Founder Q&A: Make A Boatload Of Money Doing Your Neighbor's Chores On TaskRabbit

It sounds like a real-time Craigslist. Do you have any plans to tie in other real-time networks?

Busque: A huge differentiator between us and Craigslist is the trust, safety, security, the reputation system we've created.

All of our TaskRabbits go through a vetting process, which includes an online application, a video interview, a series of background checks, and then an online quiz that they have to pass before they're activated on the site.

How many postings are getting fulfilled?

Grosse: We don't disclose that right now but over the past 6 months, the amount of posted tasks that have been completed has tripled.

What do you attribute the growth to?

Grosse: Stories like the Diane Sawyer piece certainly don't hurt. We were inundated with requests after that story ran. I think we had more than 6 million hits and the TaskRabbit pipeline that Leah referred to overflowed with people who wanted to become TaskRabbits, as well as those who wanted to know when the service was coming to their neighborhood, which was tremendously gratifying.

Do other competitors, like Zarly, do the same vetting process? Couldn't being too safe hurt growth?

Busque: The pipeline process is certainly a key differentiator with what anyone else is doing right now in the marketplace.

Grosse: We haven't disclosed publicly where we're going next, but we're actively looking at new markets to go into. We want to make sure that when we do move into new markets we provide the type of quality and experience that people come to expect from the service.

There's this concept called Net Promoter Scores, or how happy are you with the service. Would you recommend this service to your friend? The scores that we're getting on that are literally off the charts. They're comparable to what Google and Amazon see.

From my background in travel at HotWire and Expedia, the metrics that TaskRabbit is seeing are more than double at what I saw at both those companies.

Any future products we can expect TaskRabbit to launch?

Busque: One interesting feature we have coming up is a TaskRabbit API.

We're seeing are a lot of productivity apps, like to-do list apps, that want a way to plug in and outsource those to-do list items to a TaskRabbit network that can actually complete them.

The APIs will be coming up in the next month or so.

We're also working on more mobile platforms. We want to tackle Android, iPad and continue to optimize the web and iPhone versions.